ecumenical council - (early Christian church) one of seven gatherings of bishops from around the known world under the presidency of the Pope to regulate matters of faith and morals and discipline; "the first seven councils through 787 are considered to be ecumenical councils by both the Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox church but the next fourteen councils are considered ecumenical only by the Roman Catholic church"

For this reason, Phaleas the Chalcedonian first proposed, that the fortunes of the citizens should be equal, which he thought was not difficult to accomplish when a community was first settled, but that it was a work of greater difficulty in one that had been long established; but yet that it might be effected, and an equality of circumstances introduced by these means, that the rich should give marriage portions, but never receive any, while the poor should always receive, but never give.

The "Chalcedonian giant," Thrasymachus, of whom we have already heard in the Phaedrus, is the personification of the Sophists, according to Plato's conception of them, in some of their worst characteristics.

Since "theologians as diverse as Cyril and Nestorius, Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians, Maximus the Confessor and Monothelites all claimed Gregory's authority for their own doctrinal ends" (227), Hofer is more than doubtful about the adequacy of the Dogmengeschichte approach for the different Christologies before Chalcedon, and especially for Gregory's very distinctive account of Christ.

We learned the difference between Arius and Athanasius, Chalcedonians and Monophysites, Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Arminians, Presbyterians and Methodists, evangelicals and Pentecostals, and so forth--but not much about what any of them may have in common.

In the heated controversies after the Council of 451 on the correct interpretation of pre-Chalcedonian Christology, Cyril was the supreme authority that was claimed both by the Chalcedonians and by the miaphysites for their own cause.

In the East, the council failed to reconcile the Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians and opened up the Eastern Church to a new festering dogmatic crisis, that of Monotheletism, the view that Christ had only one will, while deliberately leaving vague whether Christ as man had a truly operating free will in the union or whether there existed only one will in the union, that of the divine.

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